more communities

I like to start with the bad news, and you don’t get a choice, so here goes:

There will be no podcasts for the next two weeks.

Joel is on an extended vacation. Our apologies, but the logistics of recording remotely are too daunting.

Plus, we want Joel to enjoy his vacation, right? Me, I don’t get a vacation. I have to work frantically with Jarrod, Geoff, and Jeremy on this Stack Overflow thing. Not that I’m bitter or anything. I’ll just set my desktop background to something tropical. It’s almost the same thing as a vacation. Almost.

I asked around on Twitter and got a recommendation for a Google Spreadsheet Form. I looked at Wufoo and SurveyMonkey but their limits are too low. I must say I’m impressed with the Google docs spreadsheet form solution; it’s working amazingly well. And it’s so simple. Every time someone visits the form and signs up, a new row is created in the spreadsheet. Easy!

I just read your post about desktop images. I have to say I really like to see a good desktop image when I lock my computer. In fact, I usually drag the “press ctrl+alt+delete to log in” window so that it’s not even visible. I guess I could be “green” and turn off the monitor, but it will cut itself off after 30 minutes of being idle so I don’t bother.

OK the captcha has 1/2 in it (like the 1/2 symbol, not one-slash-two). How am I supposed to know how to type that?

@kip: That’s the beaty of re-captcha. They always show 2 words. One they know the solution of, the other they don’t know. If you get the one they know correctly, you went through the filter. The other word is given to many many users until they are confident enough that the word written by users is the one shown.

Seems that you are falling in a login/registration barrier…(yeah I know it is private and not public but…).

You are asking to register into a google doc, in order to get registered in the stackoverflow.com beta.

Seems that you need a pre-registration in order to grant access and sent invites outs at 100 per day.

Not a big thing, but, Why no just get people registered directly in stackoverflow.com, having them in a queue and just grant access at 100 per day, and sent invites to the e-mail previously used in the registration?.

A possible subject for the developer podcast:
You’ve told us about the technology stack you’ve chosen to work with. How has it been working with these technologies, especially with LINQ as the data access layer and a pre-release MVC.net on the presentation side.

I wonder if by invite isn’t a good way to keep the site about programming instead of enlargement and banking opportunities. If programmers on the site can invite other programmers ala gmail’s beta, you’d get anyone who wanted in signed up in fairly short order, but keep out the majority of the amateur pharmacists.